Monthly Archive for March, 2008

Mediocre essays on great film, part two

Published on March 20, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Here’s my essay on Godard’s La Chi­noise, as promised. It’s so fresh that I haven’t even read over it since turn­ing it in to my pro­fes­sor.
____________________________________________________________________

Real­ity of the Reflection

“The social­ist lit­er­a­ture and art must fight on two fronts. Art doesn’t reflect real­ity, but is a real­ity of reflec­tion.” — Kir­ilov in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise

In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard released La Chi­noise, his thir­teenth fea­ture film. The work fol­lows four French youth who align them­selves with Maoist com­mu­nism in their search to find mean­ing in their lives. Through a series of documentary-style vignettes col­laged with pop art and arranged into a lin­ear nar­ra­tive, La Chi­noise shows the char­ac­ters seek­ing great leaps for­ward based on Mao’s phi­los­o­phy and aim­ing to coor­di­nate a com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion in France for the ben­e­fit of its citizens.

In May of 1968, the stu­dent protests and gen­eral strike con­sid­ered to be the cat­a­lyst for France’s shift in social moral­ity occurred. Now, in 2008, La Chi­noise does not exist on DVD, and is only avail­able for view­ing when its film print is shown in theaters.

There is a very real pos­si­bil­ity that the release of La Chi­noise, the protests in 1968 France, and the cur­rent inac­ces­si­bil­ity of the film are not con­nected; how­ever, the three ideas in a group can rep­re­sent the role of art in social impact.

After a recent view­ing of the film at Seattle’s North­west Film Forum, a middle-aged man asked me if I’d liked it. I answered him sim­ply: I thought the film was fan­tas­tic. Despite the dra­matic irony sup­plied by its dat­ing, the story felt fresh and the cin­e­matog­ra­phy and gen­eral artis­tic risk-taking was unlike any­thing I’d seen. The man scoffed at me, and I real­ized he’d been look­ing for some­thing a lit­tle more scathing. I asked him what he thought, and he response was some­thing to the extent of

“I found it self-indulgent and narrow-minded. You know who the main char­ac­ter was? The direc­tor. And I think he’s got the wrong idea about the value of col­lec­tive action. You can’t just go around killing peo­ple and think that it will solve society’s prob­lems. The peo­ple in power don’t always do what they should, but indi­vid­u­als can’t change that. You know Barack Obama? He wants to send more troops to Iraq. There’s no one we can trust any­more, and those self­ish kids in that movie set a bad exam­ple of social action.”

Though I prob­a­bly shouldn’t have been sur­prised, the man’s out­burst had me floored. Incor­rect asser­tions aside, that inter­ac­tion can rep­re­sent a com­pli­cated idea that’s present in most socially-conscious work of today. The film, which is clas­si­fied as a fic­tional work (though it could eas­ily be argued oth­er­wise) seemed to soften the inter­sec­tion between social respon­si­bil­ity and beau­ti­ful art in a method of chang­ing peo­ples’ per­spec­tives on the causes they address. In the case of the man I spoke to, this pur­pose was clearly not achieved: he only reacted to the social con­tent. Though the film could prob­a­bly stand alone on either side of the argu­ment (social com­men­tary vs. piece of art for art’s sake), it pro­vides a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what is referred to in La Chi­noise as “the strug­gle on two fronts”: the attempt to make a work that suc­cess­fully addresses a social issue while mak­ing it avail­able to a larger audi­ence through artis­tic accessibility.

DEUXIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

La Chinoise’s level of suc­cess as a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of the two sides of the strug­gle and gen­er­ally as an artis­tic piece of social com­men­tary can be exam­ined through the the­o­ries of Kant and Niet­zsche. Both the­o­rists write on the pur­suit of truth’s ani­ma­tion through the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of two dif­fer­ent worlds — for Kant, noumena and phe­nom­ena, and for Niet­zsche, for the Apol­lon­ian and the Dionysian — which relates directly to Godard’s strug­gle on two fronts. Relat­ing more specif­i­cally to redemp­tion aside from truth, how­ever, both the­o­rists also advance the idea of going through and then destroy­ing beauty as a method of lib­er­a­tion that res­onates well with La Chinoise.

TROISIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

We can first take a look at beauty and respon­si­bil­ity in the one of the documentary-style inter­views with Guil­laume — one of the film’s prin­ci­ple char­ac­ters — in the sec­ond por­tion of the film, where he begins rehears­ing the first few lines from a play he’s prac­tic­ing and then stops, laughs a lit­tle, and then explains “Yes, I’m an actor.” At this point, we are intro­duced to the idea of “true the­ater,” which Guil­laume advances as the idea that every­one is an actor at all times reflect­ing on true sit­u­a­tions, and that just because he is an actor (which we see by the ques­tions asked of him off set and the turn­ing of the cam­era on the cam­era­man) we should never doubt the sin­cer­ity of his words.

He fol­lows up this beau­ti­ful idea of sincerity’s neces­sity in social cri­tique and art with the asser­tion (in the same breath) that you also need vio­lence. He takes one idea, for exam­ple by rehears­ing an idea of the cul­tural Marx­ist, Louis Althusser: “I turn around, and sud­denly the ques­tion is the words I’ve just said are part of a greater play con­tin­u­ing through me,” and then makes it his own: “the play of the worker in the theater.”

We can begin to under­stand Guillaume’s asser­tions through Kant’s think­ing. In his Cri­tique of Judg­ment, Kant writes on new meth­ods of judg­ment as well as a new method of look­ing at the move­ment inspired by beauty and truth. We see a def­i­n­i­tion of two dis­tinct worlds of exis­tence: one of nat­ural neces­sity, and one of free­dom. This divi­sion between nature’s objec­tive, deter­min­is­tic laws and moral freedom’s sub­jec­tiv­ity is not unlike Plato’s divi­sion between the sen­sory and intel­li­gi­ble realms; how­ever, it is not based on a dialec­tic where an indi­vid­ual can ascend or descend within those two realms on their jour­ney toward a sin­gle One. Here, the two worlds — the sen­sory, sub­jec­tive world of the noumena and the intel­li­gi­ble, objec­tive world of the phe­nom­ena –are ani­mated via their need for some sort of unity, which can occur through a super­sen­si­ble sub­strate: art.

Through­out this film, we sense a need for the stu­dents to be able to apply their the­o­ries to real life; they need to find a way to apply their facts, which are based on the objec­tive asser­tions of the col­lec­tive work­ers ethos and Mao’s Lit­tle Red Book, to the rest of the world. They become obsessed with the idea of devot­ing them­selves to a cause and being com­pletely engrossed in their endeav­ors, ensu­ing in a fanat­i­cal study of Mao’s doc­trines and sub­scrib­ing to the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion in China. In so doing, how­ever, we could doubt their sin­cer­ity just due to the fact that they are try­ing to “strug­gle on two fronts”: that they are focus­ing their energy both on their art — act­ing — and on sup­port­ing their cause.

Guil­laume pleads that we don’t doubt, and instead only real­ize that a film can be the work of a col­lec­tive group of peo­ple who share in sim­i­lar ideas and should there­fore be taken very seri­ously in their meth­ods of demonstration.

Kant’s dis­tinc­tion between the ana­lytic of the beau­ti­ful and the sub­lime also lends itself to an exam­i­na­tion of this film. “[Nature] excites the ideas of the sub­lime in its chaos or in its wildest and most irreg­u­lar dis­or­der and des­o­la­tion, pro­vided size and might are per­ceived,” he writes (Kant, 84). And as for its redemp­tive value? “[In] gen­eral, it dis­plays noth­ing pur­po­sive in nature itself, but only in that pos­si­ble use of our intu­itions of it by which there is pro­duced in us a feel­ing of pur­po­sive­ness quite inde­pen­dent of nature.” The idea of a strange kind of uneasi­ness lead­ing to great joy con­nects to another of the film’s inter­views where Veronique, arguably the leader of the group, looks the cam­era in the eye and explains that she would dyna­mite the Sor­bonne (edu­ca­tion), the Lou­vre (visual art), and the Come­die Fran­caise (the­ater) if she had the courage, just for the sake of start­ing over from zero and recon­sid­er­ing our morals from the present, based on the col­lec­tive (size-based) ethos. She tells us that the Rev­o­lu­tion can’t be art: it can’t hold the ten­der­ness or finesse of a piece, but rather it rips away all that we know and forces us to begin from the present, start­ing from scratch.

We can also see a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this ide­ol­ogy Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where he pro­vides us with the exam­i­na­tion of the Dionysian-Apollonian dual­ity within Greek tragedy. The Greek tragedy, Niet­zsche writes, is the only instance where the mutu­ally exclu­sive Dionysian and the Apol­lon­ian are united — and are united only for a moment — and in that moment of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion we have a glimpse into what­ever real­ity we can con­ceive (though Niet­zsche writes that we can never know the thing itself). As said in the film: art isn’t a reflec­tion of real­ity, it’s the real­ity of reflection.

The Apol­lon­ian wis­dom is that of dreams, which is purely based on images and allows appear­ances to appear at all. These images, which are also referred to (among other things) as masks, are able to cloud the dark chaos that Niet­zsche believes char­ac­ter­izes the world. As such, for­get­ting is a fun­da­men­tally Apol­lon­ian char­ac­ter­is­tic, which also allows indi­vid­u­als to trust in their own indi­vid­ual frame­works via their faith in their own autonomous ego. The Dionysian wis­dom, on the other hand, is the wis­dom of ter­ror and is specif­i­cally char­ac­ter­ized by the awe of and result­ing drunk­en­ness relat­ing to that ter­ror. As said, Niet­zsche believes the uni­verse is ulti­mately is irra­tional and wants to devour every­thing. Diony­sus, as the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this belief and the pri­mal heart of the world, breaks down the bar­ri­ers devel­oped and sus­tained by the indi­vid­ual trust in Apol­lon­ian aes­thet­ics: “Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaf­firmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hos­tile, or sub­ju­gated, cel­e­brates once more her rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with her prodi­gal son, man […] Now the slave is free; now all the stub­born, hos­tile bar­ri­ers, which neces­sity, caprice, or ‘shame­less fash­ion’ have erected between man and man, are bro­ken down” (Niet­zsche, 501). When the bar­ri­ers between man and man (and man and Nature) are bro­ken down, man senses his par­tic­i­pa­tion in uni­ver­sal har­mony and a higher com­mu­nity and expe­ri­ences a “redemp­tion through release” (Niet­zsche, 508). This redemp­tion, Niet­zsche writes, is deserv­ing of a “rap­tur­ous vision” and fur­ther fuels the Dionysian energy as it is the clos­est por­tal to real­ity man can possess.

Kant finds some unity with Niet­zsche based on the con­cepts of the sub­lime with Nietzsche’s idea of the redemp­tion of Dion­y­sis. Dionysian unity tears down Apol­lon­ian prin­cip­ium indi­vid­u­a­tio­nis, thereby rip­ping away the Apol­lon­ian masks to expose real­ity. As Niet­zsche writes, there is a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion to this decon­struc­tion: “The hor­ri­ble ‘witches’ brew’ of sen­su­al­ity and cru­elty becomes inef­fec­tive: only the curi­ous blend­ing and dual­ity in the emo­tions of the Dionysian rev­el­ers remind us — as med­i­cines remind us of deadly poi­sons — of the phe­nom­e­non that pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us” (Niet­zsche, 504). We see fur­ther appli­ca­tion of Veronique’s the­ory in the film in her long, sta­tic scene on the train with her pro­fes­sor when she dis­cusses, in com­plete earnest, her inten­tions to bomb the uni­ver­si­ties as a method of reeval­u­at­ing their abysmal sit­u­a­tion which is tired and com­pla­cent, even in the face of the Viet­nam War. Her pro­fes­sor, who was involved in the Alger­ian War, explains that she will never find any last­ing sup­port unless she has pop­u­lar back­ing at the time of her bomb­ings, and she only had con­trol of three peo­ple in a movement.

DERNIÈRE MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

As sug­gested before, the idea of the strug­gle on two fronts as well as the idea of rip­ping way apa­thetic, indif­fer­ent exte­ri­ors in favor of the real­ity that lies beneath and start­ing from scratch at the present isn’t just applic­a­ble to La Chinoise’s con­tent: it’s also applic­a­ble to the film’s aes­thetic and tech­ni­cal elements.

Godard’s inno­v­a­tive film­mak­ing ethos expertly walks the line between social com­men­tary and work of art. From the begin­ning, the film doesn’t let the viewer a rest or retreat into a stream­lined nar­ra­tive. Though the nar­ra­tive pro­gresses in a some­what lin­ear fash­ion, we are often sub­jected to a dif­fer­ent form of blur­ring fic­tion and real­ity. As said, this film is based on a fic­tional nar­ra­tive of four stu­dents liv­ing together in a com­fort­able Parisian apart­ment over the sum­mer, and the nar­ra­tive works in a cir­cle that begins and ends on the same image of their apart­ment doors, giv­ing us the per­cep­tion that noth­ing has been accom­plished in the film, but within that rev­o­lu­tion (as in a cir­cle), we are engrossed in var­i­ous vignettes. To fur­ther com­pli­cate ideas, the art of the film varies between scenes full of jump cuts between images of the actors as well as col­lages of pop art. Though the align­ment of visual art with images of human actors may prompt some explicit ques­tions, they do more to excite a feel­ing rather than actu­ally pro­mote any fur­ther under­stand­ing of the subject.

Godard addi­tion­ally cre­ates a new sphere with his audi­ence as viewer-listeners rather that just view­ers alone, which is a hugely sig­nif­i­cant part of his film­mak­ing. Rather than just being able to lose our­selves in a pro­gres­sion of images, the sounds he uses keep us off-balance, never let us sit back, make sure that we’re still extremely present. It makes us expe­ri­ence the rejec­tion of pas­siv­ity that he’s try­ing to sup­port. This expe­ri­enc­ing of emo­tions is what makes La Chi­noise so riv­et­ing, and what gives it a redemp­tive power that even the man who talked to me after the film had to under­stand. Which brings us back to Kant’s orig­i­nal point: we don’t nec­es­sar­ily all have to agree that La Chi­noise is a great film, but we should all feel a cer­tain way about its effects.

There is a notable scene relat­ing to the power of music which may be a car­i­ca­ture, but still raises a valu­able point. As Kir­ilov, another of the com­rades, lec­tures the oth­ers on social­ist art and literature’s need to strug­gle on two fronts — in other words, to have a moral pur­pose behind its beauty, just as Godard attempts to do — Guil­laume con­sid­ers the idea and then claims that it is much too com­pli­cated, assert­ing that he wouldn’t be able to make sense of two things at once. At that point Veronique, his girl­friend, asks him if he loves her, as she had done before in the film.

“Of course I do,” he responds.

“Well, I don’t love you anymore.”

He stares at her, bewil­dered, and says that he doesn’t under­stand. “You will,” she replies, and she lets a record drop and aligns the nee­dle. As the music begins to play, she says,

“I don’t love you any­more. I don’t like your face, and I don’t care for your sweaters. And you bore me ter­ri­bly.” She removes the nee­dle from the record. “Under­stand now?”

He responds in the affirmative.

“You see? You can under­stand two things at once — you’ve just done it.”

Mediocre essays on great film, part one

Published on March 17, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

One of the great things about being a Com­par­a­tive His­tory of Ideas major at the UW is that I get to take classes with titles like, “On Beauty.” And since On Beauty is a CHID class, that means I get to read the­o­ries of art and aes­thet­ics by the greats (Plato, assorted Neo­pla­ton­ists, a grab bag of Ger­man ide­al­ists) and lit­er­a­ture that is influ­enced by those the­o­rists (Sopho­cles, Goethe, Rilke), and addi­tion­ally watch “beau­ti­ful” films to which those the­o­ries of aes­thet­ics apply.

So lately, I’ve taken to writ­ing mediocre essays on great film. The fol­low­ing essay is my On Beauty midterm, and was writ­ten as a Pla­tonic analy­sis of redemp­tive beauty as rep­re­sented by French New Wave film direc­tor Fran­cois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. My argu­ment is sim­ple and largely incor­rect. I will post a sim­i­lar essay (my On Beauty final), which will be writ­ten on fel­low FNW direc­tor Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chi­noise, on Thurs­day.
______________________________________________________________________

Love in Vain

“Hearts that love in vain, my God, how they cause pain.”
– Cather­ine in Fran­cois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim

There is a scene in Fran­cois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim where the three pri­mary char­ac­ters — Jules, Jim, and Cather­ine — exit a play and walk together along the Seine while dis­cussing the main female char­ac­ter. After a lit­tle back and forth on the impor­tance of clar­ity regard­ing that character’s fidelity to her hus­band, Jules asks,

“Who wrote that woman is nat­ural, and there­fore abominable?”

Jim responds, “Baude­laire, on cer­tain women.”

Jules laughs, and replies, “Not at all! He meant women in gen­eral!” He con­tin­ues to pon­tif­i­cate on this point until Cather­ine remarks on the two men’s idiocy, con­demn­ing Jules for being so brazen and Jim for fail­ing to con­test his remarks. At that point, she stands on a short stone bar­rier next to the river and the cam­era frames a shot close on her face. She lifts her veil, reveal­ing the sim­ple, calm, con­fi­dent smile the viewer has come to know so well before she inex­plic­a­bly jumps into the river. The viewer is still bewil­dered when the nar­ra­tor says,

“Jim fixed Catherine’s leap in his mind and made a sketch of it although he’d never drawn before. He felt a burst of admi­ra­tion and in his thoughts sent her an invis­i­ble kiss. He men­tally swam with her and held his breath to scare Jules.”

This nar­ra­tion bears strik­ing resem­blance to the fol­low­ing pas­sage, taken from Plato’s Phaedrus:

“And thus he loves, but he knows not what; he does not under­stand and can­not explain his own state; he appears to have caught the infec­tion of blind­ness from another; the lover is his mir­ror in whom he is hold­ing him­self, but he is not aware of this. When he is with the lover, both cease from their pain, but when he is away then he longs as he is longed for, and has loves image, love for love (Anteros) lodg­ing in his breast, which he calls and believes to be not love but friend­ship only, and his desire of the other, but weaker; he wants to see him, touch him, kiss, embrace him, and prob­a­bly not long after­wards his desire is accom­plished” (Plato, 66).

In the Pla­tonic modes of inter­pret­ing real­ity, there is only one source of beauty: the One. There are, how­ever, two forms of redemp­tion. We should all be con­cerned with the purifi­ca­tion of our souls, write the the­o­rists, and the best way to take up that con­cern is to devote our­selves to the pur­suit of truth, which begins with the appre­ci­a­tion and clar­i­fi­ca­tion of beauty. This appre­ci­a­tion of beauty holds the sec­ond form of redemp­tion, which is to make copies of that beauty and achieve immor­tal­ity for the indi­vid­ual self. An imple­men­ta­tion of these forms of redemp­tion is seen in the pol­i­tics of love rep­re­sented through­out Truffaut’s film.

In Jules et Jim, Jules and Jim have taken up that pur­suit with Cather­ine as their divine form. We can see in the scene recounted above that Cather­ine is a muse and source of inspi­ra­tion for the two men (par­tic­u­larly, in that case, for Jim, though else­where there are sim­i­lar instances with Jules). The film is essen­tially the story of the two great friends and their encounter with a beau­ti­ful, enig­matic woman. Jules and Jim are com­pared to San­cho Panza and Don Quixote, and share a per­fectly har­mo­nious friend­ship aside from Jim attract­ing many women and Jules attract­ing nearly none. The film begins when the two men are view­ing slides of art­work they might pur­chase, and they come across one par­tic­u­lar sculp­ture that they decide to visit. When they view it in per­son, they find it mes­mer­iz­ing: it has beau­ti­ful lips arranged in a calm, star­tling smile, and they spend an hour gaz­ing at it, find­ing it oddly famil­iar. The two decide that if they ever again see such a smile, they will fol­low it, and they return home “filled with this new rev­e­la­tion.” And, of course, they do find the smile man­i­fested in Catherine’s human form. When we first see her, her face is irrefutably sim­i­lar to the sculp­ture and the afore­men­tioned close-up before she plunges into the Seine.

In attempt­ing a Pla­tonic cri­tique of the redemp­tive value of beauty, specif­i­cally the beauty that flows from Cather­ine to Jules and Jim, Plato’s Phae­drus is a good place to begin. It is here where we are intro­duced to the char­i­o­teer metaphor as a vehi­cle to dis­cuss the dif­fer­ence between mor­tal­ity and immor­tal­ity. In the metaphor, the char­i­o­teer is the spirit of an indi­vid­ual, the light horse is the mind, and the dark horse is the body, and all three of these crea­tures are in pur­suit of the one and only source of beauty: the Beloved. Upon the three’s first sight of their source, one horse exer­cises self-restraint while the other unabashedly rushes for­ward, and the dynamic between the two horses and the maneu­ver­ing of the char­i­o­teer deter­mines whether the indi­vid­ual will ascend into the intel­li­gi­ble realm or descend into the sen­sory. Plato writes on this metaphor as relat­ing to his dialec­tic: “The soul of a man may pass into the life of a beast, or from the beast return again into the man. But the soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into the human form. For a man must have the intel­li­gence of uni­ver­sals, and be able to pro­ceed from the many par­tic­u­lars of sense to one con­cep­tion of rea­son” (Plato, 60). This idea of one con­cep­tion of rea­son begins to lead us to the idea that either knowl­edge or love will be the source of beauty (and there­fore cen­ter­piece of our pur­suits), and as Plato later describes, that source is love.

We can refer here back to the orig­i­nal anec­dote, where Jules retorts to Jim’s claim that the Baude­laire quo­ta­tion refers only to cer­tain women that the quo­ta­tion in fact refers to women in gen­eral. Relat­ing both to Plato’s the­o­ries of techne (“[If] there are arts, there is a stan­dard of mea­sure, and if there is a stan­dard of mea­sure, there are arts; but if either is want­ing, there is nei­ther” (Plato, 7)) and the exis­tence of and devo­tion to forms (“Even so, as I main­tain, nei­ther we nor our guardians, whom we have to edu­cate, can ever become musi­cal until we and they know the essen­tial forms, in all their com­bi­na­tions, and can rec­og­nize them and their images wher­ever they are found, not slight­ing them either in small things or great, but believ­ing them all to be within the sphere of one art and study” (Plato, 28)), Plato educes the idea that beauty is found in uni­ver­sal con­cepts. This is a direct con­tra­dic­tion to the beauty in Jules’ and Jim’s friend­ship that is sug­gested by the film’s nar­ra­tor: that their beauty lies in the details. We see here that although their friend­ship does not change, the intro­duc­tion of Cather­ine to their lives shifts the two men’s focus: instead of hav­ing the knowl­edge of their par­tic­u­lars as their cen­ter­piece, their love for and pur­suit of Cather­ine now pre­sides over their men­tal state.

On that token, we con­tinue on to Sym­po­sium, where Plato fur­thers the idea of the depar­ture of knowl­edge and the rise of love. He writes, “Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tem­pers, opin­ions, desires, plea­sures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us […] For what is implied in the word ‘rec­ol­lec­tion’ but the depar­ture of knowl­edge, which is ever being for­got­ten, and is renewed and pre­served by rec­ol­lec­tion, and appears to be the same although in real­ity new accord­ing to that law of suc­ces­sion by which all mor­tal things are pre­served, not absolutely the same, but by sub­sti­tu­tion, the old worn-out mor­tal­ity leav­ing another new and sim­i­lar exis­tence behind — unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another?” (Plato, 73). Here we are intro­duced to the Pla­tonic idea of rec­ol­lec­tion, or anam­ne­sis, which is the idea that we hold the truth inside us and now and then we can phys­i­cally see it.

For Jules and Jim, that rec­ol­lec­tion takes place upon their view­ing of the sculp­ture: they see the face, they rec­og­nize its beauty, and they fur­ther acknowl­edge their vague rec­ol­lec­tion of hav­ing seen it before. This brings up two addi­tional con­cepts n addi­tion to anam­ne­sis. Before they rec­og­nize the face, they have to look at it. When the beauty draws them in, their fix­a­tion or gaze on the beau­ti­ful art is pro­longed. The moment of their stare is extended for an hour. The longer they stay, the longer they want to stay so, as said, they make an agree­ment then and there to pur­sue the face if they should ever see it again. This makes a con­nec­tion between beauty and truth: the beauty upon which Jules and Jim fix their gazes prods them toward a fur­ther pur­suit of truth and, there­fore, closer to some form of redemption.

Here addi­tion­ally is that afore­men­tioned tran­si­tion between knowl­edge and love as pur­suits: Plato writes that in anam­ne­sis, our knowl­edge is con­stantly in flux, and so is not of uni­ver­sals. Love, which is eter­nal, is uni­ver­sal. Plato con­tin­ues: “And in this way, Socrates, the mor­tal body, or mor­tal any­thing, par­takes of immor­tal­ity; but the immor­tal in another way. Mar­vel not then at the love which all men have for their off­spring; for that uni­ver­sal love and inter­est is for the sake of immor­tal­ity” (Plato, 73–4).

Here is the redemp­tion we seek. Though the con­sump­tion of beauty for the sake of gain­ing clar­ity relat­ing to truth is of issue for the purifi­ca­tion of our souls, we pri­mar­ily look to make beauty and our­selves immor­tal. In Socrates’ con­ver­sa­tion with Dio­tima in Sym­po­sium (as has been quoted already), Plato writes: “Beauty, then, is the des­tiny or god­dess of par­tu­ri­tion who pre­sides at birth, and there­fore, when approach­ing beauty, the con­ceiv­ing power is pro­pi­tious, and dif­fu­sive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit […] And this is the rea­son why, when the hour of con­cep­tion arrives, and the teem­ing nature is full, there is such a flut­ter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alle­vi­a­tion of the pain of tra­vail. For love, Socrates, is not, as you imag­ine, the love of the beau­ti­ful only. [It is] the love of gen­er­a­tion and of birth in beauty” (Plato, 72).

As men­tioned before, in gaz­ing at the beau­ti­ful sculp­ture, both Jules and Jim pro­long their gazes in an attempt to get their fill of the beauty. They never can, though, because their desire for beauty almost always out­lasts the beauty itself. A method, then, of attempt­ing to pro­long that beauty fur­ther is to make copies of it or, as Dio­tima says, to “beget” more copies of the beauty. Another word­ing of this is to have chil­dren with the source of beauty.

The issue of beget­ting chil­dren brings us back to a dis­cus­sion of the film, where both Jules and Jim want to “make copies” with Cather­ine, and for about the first half of the film, Jules is suc­cess­ful in his pur­suit. He and Cather­ine sus­tain a rela­tion­ship for some time, even­tu­ally get mar­ried dur­ing World War I, and have a child — a girl, named Sabine. There is a moment, how­ever, when Jules, Jim, and Cather­ine are walk­ing back to their vaca­tion house from a day at the beach, when Jules asks Jim if he would mind if Jules mar­ried Cather­ine. Jim replies,

“I’m afraid she’ll never be happy here on earth. She’s a vision for all, per­haps not meant for one man alone.”

This quo­ta­tion fur­thers the idea of Cather­ine as a sen­sory man­i­fes­ta­tion of a form, but it also begins the film on a sur­vey of Catherine’s failed and unortho­dox rela­tion­ships. Toward the begin­ning of the film, before the scene where Jules asks about mar­riage, Jim picks Cather­ine up from her house to take her to the train sta­tion. When he enters her room, she takes a few crum­pled pieces of paper from a pot, puts them on the floor, and sets them on fire. “Lies,” she explains, as they burn and briefly catch fire to her night­gown. Shortly after, in the same scene, she takes a small bot­tle from her purse and explains, “Sul­fu­ric acid. For the eyes of men who tell lies.” Though in Plato, the Gods and the forms can do no wrong, when bad things hap­pen, the expla­na­tion is often that the Gods made those things hap­pen for a rea­son, often as pun­ish­ment. Cather­ine takes a sim­i­lar stance: she has pun­ish­ments in store for when she feels underappreciated.

Catherine’s rela­tion­ships often dis­in­te­grate despite (and per­haps because of) her prepa­ra­tion for fail­ure. It is in these fail­ures of rela­tion­ships where the lim­i­ta­tions of Plato’s idea of beau­ti­ful redemp­tion through beget­ting copies (immor­tal­ity) and the pur­suit of truth (clar­i­fy­ing dis­cerni­bil­ity of beauty) are exposed. After Jules’ mar­riage to Cather­ine, Jim vis­its the cou­ple and Sabine at their home in Aus­tria. There, Jules con­fides in Jim that Cather­ine is grow­ing tired of their mar­riage. She dis­ap­pears for long amounts of time, pun­ishes him for mis­takes he can’t define (much like Jim’s ear­lier tacit agree­ment with Jules on Baudelaire’s analy­sis of women), and has con­stant affairs with other men. Even­tu­ally, Cather­ine decides that she wants to pur­sue a rela­tion­ship with Jim, which he hap­pily begins but even­tu­ally falls to the same fate as Jules. Their rela­tion­ship fails, how­ever, largely because the cou­ple can’t beget children.

In the begin­ning of Jim and Catherine’s rela­tion­ship, there is a point where Jules (who is Aus­trian) shouts down a quo­ta­tion in Ger­man to the cou­ple, and then asks Cather­ine to trans­late. “Hearts that love in vain,” she says, “my God, how they cause pain.” She then asks to bor­row Jules’ copy of Goethe’s Elec­tive Affini­ties, a novel based on a dis­cus­sion of the pos­si­bil­ity of human pas­sions, such as mar­riage, con­flict, and free will, being sub­ject to reg­u­la­tion via the laws of chem­istry. There is a sim­i­lar dis­cus­sion present in Jules et Jim, as we have seen, which relates to Plato’s ideas of redemp­tive beauty. This film bla­tantly asks a ques­tion: can a rela­tion­ship ever work between three peo­ple, where two men love the same woman and the women loves both men?

Through­out the film, we see many dif­fer­ent rep­re­sen­ta­tions of failed rela­tion­ships and lov­ing done in vain — Cather­ine and Jules, Cather­ine and Jim, Cather­ine and Albert, Cather­ine and Napoleon. — based on the Pla­tonic model of the suc­cess­ful cou­ple. We addi­tion­ally see exam­ples of unortho­dox rela­tion­ships, such as the ones held by Therese, Jules and Jim’s friend from early in the film, who hops from bed to bed but even­tu­ally set­tles down with one man, say­ing, “We’re a per­fect cou­ple! No kids!” Here, we can argue that Plato’s the­ory of suc­cess based on chil­dren has not with­stood the test of time, even in the 1960s, and Catherine’s model of the per­fect cou­ple, where for a rela­tion­ship to work, at least one of the two peo­ple needs to be faith­ful, is gain­ing more success.

For Jules, Jim, and Cather­ine, there is a Pla­tonic means of inter­pret­ing their ends. The lim­i­ta­tions of redemp­tion are exposed. The rela­tion­ship between the three ends when Cather­ine dri­ves her­self and Jim off a bridge and into a river as Jules looks on. Here, Jules is essen­tially suc­cess­ful since he is left with a copy of Cather­ine in Sabine. Cather­ine finds some suc­cess in her model of reject­ing all reg­u­la­tions by shed­ding her bod­ily form, though she can­not escape it com­pletely, since her ashes can­not be scat­tered from a hill­top into a field because it is against legal regulations.

Here’s to a lasting friendship

Published on March 7, 2008 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

I’ll start this with a promise: I will post here, and I will post reg­u­larly (if not often). For now, I’ll leave you with a frag­ment of Nudge, an arts pub­li­ca­tion and project of mine that’s lately been tak­ing up a sig­nif­i­cant amount of my thought capac­ity. I started work­ing Nudge back in Octo­ber, when I was try­ing to find peo­ple who would want to make videos with me. This proved obscenely dif­fi­cult, so I set up a Face­book group for an arts pub­li­ca­tion and waited for peo­ple to respond. Long story short, I found peo­ple to make videos with and other things, too.

We pub­lished our first issue, which is more or less a tra­di­tional pub­li­ca­tion with sub­mis­sions and edi­tors, back in Jan­u­ary. Below is my let­ter from the edi­tor. I hope you read it and like it, and then we’ll talk again soon.

______________________________________________________________________

Dear friends,

I’m a big fan of Beck. I can’t think of any artist, musically-inclined or oth­er­wise, who is so suc­cess­fully both plas­tic and gen­uine. Though I adore Beck’s orig­i­nal lan­guage (I like writ­ing; I like metaphors), I also love the lan­guage he fuels. In his most recent album, Beck some­how man­aged to pin down writer Dave Eggers and direc­tor Spike Jonze and make them con­verse on one of the album tracks about the “ulti­mate record that ever could pos­si­bly be made.” One com­ment has remained with me above all:

“[The album] has to tell you how to live. As an instruc­tion guide. It’s sub­tle. It doesn’t push, it nudges. It entices. Or seduces. It has to encom­pass the whole world, every­thing that has been, is, and will be […]”

You prob­a­bly see where I’m going with this.

You’re hold­ing some­thing very fresh. This assem­blage of paper, ink, and metal is called Nudge. The Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s writ­ers, visual artists, musi­cians, and film­mak­ers can sub­mit their work here so other peo­ple can see it and think about it. The pub­li­ca­tion, how­ever, does not stand alone. There is a com­mu­nity behind it. It’s rel­a­tively large, and it gains new mem­bers nearly every day.

This is where the nudg­ing comes in.

Though this beau­ti­ful and hold­able pub­li­ca­tion is Nudge’s most vis­i­ble form, Nudge exists to cre­ate a com­mu­nity where the UW’s writ­ers, visual artists, musi­cians, and film­mak­ers can see who else is cre­at­ing new work, give each other feed­back on that work, meet new peo­ple, get famous, what­ever. What’s impor­tant here is that col­lab­o­ra­tion between peo­ple and artis­tic medias are involved.

Now is the time for artis­tic col­lab­o­ra­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton. There’s a new advis­ing hub for stu­dents of the artis­tic vari­ety, called Art­sLink. The Henry recently estab­lished a stu­dent advi­sory com­mit­tee. Inter­mis­sion has an increas­ingly large num­ber of rest­less jour­nal­ists join­ing its staff. Brico­lage is revamp­ing its mis­sion. An inspired group of poets who call them­selves Stray has joined together to form a collective.

Nudge is for the peo­ple who are will­ing to push them­selves beyond their lim­its and attempt works in forms, gen­res, ideas, and meth­ods that hold the pos­si­bil­ity of incred­i­ble suc­cess (how­ever that may be defined), but also mis­er­able fail­ure. We look to reject art’s obnox­ious ten­dency to be untouch­able. The only thing at Nudge that is untouch­able is our ded­i­ca­tion to risk­ing elit­ism and irrel­e­vance for the sake of our art.

Any­way. Like most dia­logue, the con­ver­sa­tion between Eggers and Jonze con­tin­ues. In the same breath as the quo­ta­tion from above:

“[…] and you could take it into space, and that’s why you need a space­ship. Because that’s ulti­mately what space travel is all about, is send­ing our ship from earth into space. And not just in some, like, space shut­tle that has all the foam com­ing off of it, you need your own, glow­ing, you know, mul­ti­col­ored spaceship.”

Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Until next time,
Claire